Bromley Wins Second Train Tournament At WBC 2018

The 2018 Union Pacific tournament was contested on Sunday July 22nd Starting AT 9 AM and completing at 3 PM. There were 27 different entrants in the tournament this year who played a total of 22 games. The first round consisted of 26 players and 7 games. The second round had 23 players in 6 games, and the last round had 16 players in 4 games. There were several multi game winners and one 3 game winner (Jason Arvey).

The 4 highest qualifiers of the final 16 were seeded on individual tables with the rest of the field randomly placed. 3 of the 4 semifinal games were very close, one being decided by a single dollar. Jason won his 4th game of the day and was the obvious target going into the final. The other SF winners were Olin Hentz, Trella Bromley, and Hennessey Gorham.

Players were randomly seated and Olin started the initial investment with Blue. Trella followed with black, Jason with white and Hennessey also with black. As expected, everyone built out their initial investments for the first turn. Olin pushed only the blue stock for 5 straight turns and chose to forgo the Union Pacific stock race and let the other players fight for the remaining 16 UP shares. After all players invested additional shares to bolster their investments, Olin and Trella got in a race for yellow and black stock. Olin was on Trella’s table right and had the statistically better chance to get both types of stocks, but Trella was able to speculate the needed yellow and black stocks from the down deck to maintain her lead throughout the game. Olin had a monopoly on blue thru the first two dividends, but Hennessey finally broke Olin’s blue monopoly and Jason’s white monopoly just before the 3rd dividend. Olin continued to choose a variety of stocks and appeared to be early leader in the first 3 payouts. He ended up with the most amount of different stocks and scored several 2nd place payouts without ever playing those train colors. Trella focused on building black even though Olin was on her right and attempting to take over the lead in the black stock.

The most significant event in the game occurred when Jason gave up selecting the last UP stock (it would have tied him with Trella) in favor of grabbing the red stock which was still his monopoly. This allowed Trella to take the sole lead in Union Pacific stock. The final dividend came seemingly early and money totals were extremely close: Trella 118, Hennessey 117, Olin 116, and Jason 107.